Milan Vagač - Bau 2.1

About

MILAN VAGAČ

BAU 2.1

EXHIBITION DECEMBER 6, 2021 - JANUARY 21, 2022 

TEXT ERIK VILIM
FOTO ADAM SAKOVY

His current practice is focused on language of geometrical abstraction. I’m examining its possibilities through paintings, drawings or objects. My work is based on typical forms of the modernist avant- garde such as constructivism, neoplasticism, or functionalist movements in architecture and design. An important part of my work is thus the relation to the past defined by possibilities of our memory. A retrospection and constant verification of comebacks in art generate new opportunities for the future of painting. I used the original modernist ideas to define the shape and role of similar current approaches. A modernist grid is now replaced by virtual grid, which relativizes the primary exactness. Today’s utopia is fully digitized and reflects mankind living in an atomised world. To me, abstract painting represents a suitable form of projection of the nature of the modern world. The question of abstract painting lies in the setting of its system, in the structure of relations of visual means that determine its final form.

Mold seduction
Cover, surface, form - if we look at technology in general, these words frame our first contact with them, more precisely the contact of users whose senses determine a positive or negative relationship to them. We choose products based on whether we like them or not. Surface, form, design, shape, material, structure, etc. - all this creates the aesthetics of the media, which is attacking us more and more from all sides today (advertising has never been so individually oriented and sophisticated). The diversity of aesthetic forms of technology has no boundaries, its richness is determined by the purpose that the particular thing fulfills. The aesthetics of technological media is a kind of active stimulus of our senses, it plays a game with them that simply activates our pleasure. Harmoniously fluid or contrasting colors, shapes and forms - this is what creates a potential image of ownership, generates a desire, the foundations of which lie in the aesthetic relationship to the thing itself. It is precisely the beauty of design that we cannot get rid of the feeling that what we observe creates only a purely positive feeling from observing a thing - we assume that the thing has a specific purpose that makes it what it is and we also assume practical benefits from it. ownership.
Concealment
The sphere of aesthetic knowledge aimed at the "packaging" of technology thus makes material and practical efficiency stand out. Its organs, mechanical "entrails" remain hidden from us as users [black box concept]. Computer circuits, cables, precious metals, algorithmic records - all wrapped under the plastic cover of the devices remain inaccessible to the average user. The inner workings of the new generation of information technology increasingly remain sophisticatedly hidden from our sight; the only ones who have access below the surface are the developers. They thus gain full control over their longevity, determine their temporality. Hardware becomes something sacred, inaccessible, something that only the manufacturer has access to.
Deconstruction as a method
Hiddenness and aesthetic "seduction" represent two features of current information technologies - on the one hand, the aesthetics of shapes and forms of design, on the other hand, the internal mechanism. We find similar deconstructive thinking in the presented work of Milan Vagač (* 1987). In his current solo exhibition, he plays a game between the aesthetics of technology, which he purposefully appropriates, and their pragmatic side. The continuing BAU series (since 2016) emphasizes this game in the very title, which refers to the famous Bauhaus school. It was precisely this place in which modernist thinking loosened the boundaries between free and applied art, between individual original artistic expression and mass production. Vagač again erases these boundaries, builds on her heritage, programmatically demonstrating the media characteristics of the painting itself, shifting its means of expression and at the same time updating it in the light of today's challenges. It sovereignly denies its flatness and reveals hidden layers and structures